


Not Warranted

by Fritillary



Category: Heroes (TV)
Genre: Episode" s03e02 The Butterfly Effect, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-01
Updated: 2019-05-01
Packaged: 2020-02-15 18:14:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18674896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fritillary/pseuds/Fritillary
Summary: Matt considers purpose, meaning and the sociability of vultures in the African desert.





	Not Warranted

**Author's Note:**

> Imported from Livejournal, originally written on 29/Nov/2008
> 
> Prompt: #123 - Despair [word prompt] for tamingthemuse & co-inspired by the "hope" demotivator @ despair.com  
> Very minor spoilers for episode 3.2 -the butterfly effect. strangely cheerful considering subject matter.

Hope, Matt had decided in the small part of his brain that wasn’t screaming for water, might not be warranted at this point. Oddly enough, the same small part seemed to think that despair wasn’t much of an option either; why give up and lie down in a desert when no-one knew where he was. It wasn’t as if staying put would give a greater chance of someone finding him, since the one thing Matt was quite certain of was that no-one was looking for him. After all, the only one who might even have the foggiest where he was (Matt certainly didn’t) was Peter. And not normal, sane, sensible Peter either; that futuristic, scarred, gun-wielding version, and Matt really wasn’t expecting him (or anyone whom he might tell about Matt's involuntary jaunt halfway round the world) to come to the rescue. 

Matt stumbled on over the scrubland, bits of sand scratching at his feet where it had slipped though the air holes in his trainers. Sweat dripped down the back of his neck, dampening the collar of his jacket for a moment or two before the heat of the sun dried it out again, leaving only an uncomfortable gritty feeling of salt down his shoulder blades. His throat grated as if he'd attempted to swallow an emery board, but, after hours of walking over pretty much featureless terrain, he'd fallen into an almost dreamlike state; thoughts cruising along whatever path they wished.

It figured, he thought fuzzily, that he'd had been on all the defence courses offered, by the LA police department, and even most of the ones foisted on him in NYPD (half of them mind-numbingly similar to the previous lot), but not one of them had included basic survival training - at least not any training relevant to being abruptly stranded in a desert with no way of telling which way to go. But at least 'going' gave him some sense of purpose; he'd been drilled - by his dad, by school, and then by LAPD training college - that 'having a purpose' was the best way to go about life; not necessarily having a goal, but a purpose for being that you attempt to follow every day, even if that purpose was just being at the gate every afternoon to pick Molly up from school, of being there for a small girl who'd lost everyone else.

There had been many times when Matt had wanted to get rid of his power (and just as many times when he'd been achingly glad of it) but never before had he truly wanted to exchange it for some other way of being a "hero". Sure he'd been fleetingly jealous of Claire’s inability to get injured (especially with the amount of scrapes he got into in his job) and who wouldn’t be rather envious of Peter's apparent talent for mastering any and every gift that came his way (although, if Matt were honest with himself, he'd have been the first one to panic if he'd contracted poor radioactive Ted's "power"), but now any way to get out of here he would have welcomed with open arms. 

He'd tried stretching out with his telepathy at first - straining his "mind's ear" as Mohinder had once referred to it, to find some hint of which direction to go in. But the silence - absolute quiet unlike anything he'd ever experienced - had resounded in his head, and he quickly gave up on his power being of any use out here. What was the point in listening when there was nothing to hear?

A vulture eyed him suspiciously from a nearby bone-white tree branch. Everyone knew what a vulture was, even though Matt could quite honestly say that he'd only ever seen them on television before, and 'Wow' (commented the inquisitive part of him, which seemed unreasonably enthusiastic about the whole ordeal) 'Weren’t they big?!' He'd noticed them before, just sitting around or spiraling on the air currents in the distance, but he was starting to wonder if they weren’t getting more frequent. 

'Do vultures only start to gather if they think you're about to die, or are they just hedging their bets?' he wondered. He wished he'd paid more attention to that Attenborough documentary Molly had forced him to watch. Despairing was so much easier when you were certain about the facts.


End file.
